Meet the Artist Who Won the 2018 MacArthur Genius Grant

Artist Trevor Paglen has many muses: the ocean floor, CIA black sites, and outer space, to name a few

As the infrastructure of surveillance continues to proliferate around the world, artist Trevor Paglen continues to find new ways to locate and represent those seemingly invisible systems. In extreme ways, the setting of his work diverges—the ocean floor (where he photographed NSA-tapped internet cables), CIA black sites (which he photographed using ultra-long-distance lenses), or, as he is soon to focus on, outer space (where he will send an objet d’art into orbit)—but the subject remains consistent: that is, representing invisibility. Just last month, this growing body of work earned him a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius award.” In anticipation of his upcoming project in outer space, and on the occasion of his MacArthur win, AD spoke with Paglen about his work.

Architectural Digest: Your CV has an unusual line item for an artist: PhD in Geography. How did that come about?

Trevor Paglen: I’ve always been part of a "landscape" tradition, very broadly defined. In other words, I'm obsessively curious about the basic questions: "How do humans shape the earth, and how are humans, in turn, shaped by the ways in which we've shaped the earth?" I've always done art, and did a PhD in Geography because I wanted to be able to ask questions and do research for my artwork with a level of seriousness that I didn't think would be possible without more formal training in social science. I'm basically just curious about the world and am always interested in how different fields of knowledge approach very similar kinds of questions from different perspectives.

AD: Your work defies easy categorization. How do you place yourself in an art history context?

TP: I think that when you're making art, you're in a conversation with the other humans that are alive today but you're also in a conversation with your ancestors and your descendants. That conversation across history is what we call Art History. History always rhymes, to paraphrase Mark Twain, and I learn a lot from seeing how artists in the past responded to moments in political and social history that may rhyme with our own. At the moment I've been thinking a lot about surrealism, on one hand, and Russian avant-gardism, on the other. Lately I've been making images using artificial intelligence networks. There's a kind of gothic-surrealist aesthetic that emerges, which feels like it very much speaks to the moment in history we find ourselves in—a strange world where facts seem to have been unmoored from reality and are floating on an ocean of horror.

AD: The subject of your work is so resonant now, with secrecy and surveillance a growing part of our landscape. Can you comment on the political context of your artistic curiosities?

TP: What I want out of art is things that help us see the historical moment we find ourselves living in. I see my job as literally trying to see what the world looks like and learn how to see some of the forces that are strongly shaping it. I think it comes from a commitment to engage with the world. Unlike the abstract painters of yesteryear, I'm not someone who goes in the studio everyday and imagines a world for myself. My projects come out of an engagement with the world "out there."

AD: Your definition of “out there,” though, is more expansive than most. You work has taken you to some remote spots like the ocean floor and CIA black sites. Can you tell us about your upcoming project—in outer space?

TP: Orbital Reflector is a project to design and develop a satellite whose only purpose is to be an art object. It's a small satellite that inflates into a 100-foot-long diamond-like shape in space that will reflect sunlight down to earth. It's been in development for many years, and I'm excited that we're going to be launching in summer of 2018 on a Falcon 9 rocket.